As every good thing in life, true love has been distorted in many ways. At first true love was considered possible – but only by chance or luck. Then, it became a feeling with an expiry date, and now, it’s just considered to be fairy tale. People despise it, badmouth it, and ridicule it. Families are no longer so important to society, much less marriage, and faithfulness is just unheard of.

True love seems to only exist in fictional books. People don’t believe in it and so they don’t work for it. And so you have what we see today: a loveless society, one I’m ashamed to even fight for. All the cynicism about marriage from Hollywood has now sunk in almost all our minds and nobody talks about it. Nobody reprehends it. Nobody questions it.

And if marriage is considered, the main focus is on what you’ll get from the divorce.

Despised, destroyed, and used; teenage girls don’t want to get married, they want to have children. Single parented children don’t want to get married; they want to succeed in life without the need of someone else beside them. What a fake love society we’ve become!

Where’s true love? How does one find it? Who gets to find it?

When you look at trees, you hardly think of its roots, but yet it is the roots that hold up the whole tree. Without roots, there’s no tree. True love is the very thing one cannot see and yet it holds an entire life. Few people have had the privilege of actually finding it.

I’ve been married to a wonderful caring husband for 18 years. But that’s not where I found true love, that’s where it flourished. In other words, that’s where it bore its fruits. The root however is much deeper than that. It’s a spiritual relationship that gives me the support I need, to hold onto my spouse and live happily as one.

People may neglect their spiritual side of life but they can’t deny the fact that there’s always a small voice inside their head saying ‘what is missing here?’ No matter how hard they work, no matter how much money they make, no matter how much love they feel, there’s always something missing, and they can never pinpoint it. And do you know why? Because it’s spiritual.

You can’t pinpoint a spiritual thirst. You just feel incomplete, as if there’s a huge gap right in the middle of your chest. When I finally had this spiritual revival in my life, that gap closed. I found myself. I was no longer doing it all on my own or trying to find the perfect match in the dark. I could now see. I could now choose right. I could now take a step towards a real life.

What is true love? Check out your roots. Work on them. And you’ll find out for yourself.

In faith.
Cristiane Cardoso.